How to almost win the physics Nobel

It’s that time of year again. On 3 October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will name the winners of the 111th Nobel Prize in Physics . Speculation abounds: Will it be the architects of LIGO ? The pioneers of chaos theory? Perhaps the discoverers of exoplanets? What’s certain is that the new laureates, whoever they may be, will join one of the most exclusive clubs in science. Champagne corks will be popped. News stories will be written.

Yet there will also be dozens of nominees for the prize who will be rebuffed by the Nobel committee. They, too, will join an elite club. Among the list of Nobel also-rans are Henri Poincaré, Edwin Hubble, Lise Meitner, and many other physicists who left lasting marks on the field.

We’ll probably never know for sure why some physicists win Nobel glory and others come up short; the Nobel committee is notoriously secretive about their deliberations. But decades of data on the Nobel Prize’s nominees reveal that not all snubs are created equal. It turns out that Nobel also-rans tend to fall into two groups: scientists who contributed to a Nobel-worthy breakthrough only to be overshadowed by collaborators and competitors, and undisputed giants in their field who simply set out after the wrong problem.

In the chart above, the circles represent physicists who were nominated between 1901 and 1965 but never won a Nobel. (Nomination data are released to the public only after 50 years.) The larger the circle, the more nominations an individual received. A single nomination may include up to three names—usually of scientists who have made related discoveries—and it’s not unusual for just one or two of those candidates to be awarded the Nobel. The vertical axis shows how many times each person shared a nomination with an eventual laureate; the horizontal axis indicates the number of times the person was nominated either alone or exclusively with fellow Nobel snubs. Blue indicates that a majority of nominations were shared with laureates; red, a minority.

By and large, the physicists clustered along the vertical axis are the ones who were overshadowed, in the committee’s eyes, by coworkers and competitors. That group includes the likes of Walter Gerlach, who with 1943 Nobel laureate Otto Stern discovered the quantization of spin angular momentum, and Seth Neddermeyer, who helped uncover the positron but saw the Nobel go to Carl Anderson .

But probably no one better exemplifies this group of also-rans than Bell Labs physicist Lester Germer. A codiscoverer of electron diffraction, Germer garnered 26 nominations throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, each one shared with collaborator Clint Davisson. But his Nobel chances were thwarted in 1937 when Davisson shared the prize with competitor George Thomson, who had nearly concurrently discovered the phenomenon.

It’s not uncommon for a deserving researcher to be squeezed out of Nobel contention when competing groups lay claim to the same discovery. But even so, the committee’s decision to exclude Germer was a curious one. The year he won, Thomson received just four Nobel nominations, and each of those nominations included both Germer and Davisson. What’s more, all four nominations explicitly listed Germer and Davisson as their first choice, with the second choice being to split the prize evenly among the three. In addition, Germer and Davisson were named in four additional nominations that excluded Thomson entirely. Somehow, the committee members settled on a final pairing that seems to have been no one’s preference but their own.

As for the nominees clustered along the horizontal axis, their preeminence in a scientific pursuit was unquestioned; at issue was the legitimacy of the pursuit itself. In effect, their sin was that they stood apart from the intellectual in-crowd.

The polymath Poincaré falls into this group. So do George Hale and Augusto Righi. But the archetype may well be the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who reshaped our understanding of the cosmos by establishing the rotation of the Milky Way and discovering its galactic halo. These days, he’s probably best known for his namesake cloud, a vast shell of icy planetesimals orbiting at the edge of the solar system.

Oort was nominated 24 times during the 1950s and 1960s, only once alongside an eventual laureate. (Astronomer Otto Struve of the University of California, Berkeley, once put forth Emilio Segrè as his first choice and Oort as his second, but never meant for the two men to share the prize.) The fact that most of Oort’s support came from fellow Dutchmen may have put him at a disadvantage. Statistically, the tiny country didn’t carry much sway with the Nobel committee: Only 1 in 16 Dutch nominations through 1965 produced a laureate (see chart below), compared with more than 1 in 10 nominations from Americans and nearly 1 in 6 from Great Britain.

Probably the bigger factor, however, was that the Nobel committee didn’t see astronomy as a Nobel-worthy discipline. Hale and Edwin Hubble are thought to have missed out on the prize for the same reason. The committee eventually came around, awarding the 1974 prize to British radio astronomers Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish; the committee has since doled out several more Nobels to astronomers.

Of all the physicists who’ve been spurned by the Nobel committee over the years (or at least through 1965), one defies categorization. Arnold Sommerfeld, named on a record 84 nominations, shared ballots with the likes of Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Irène Joliot-Curie. But the quantum theorist was also the sole nominee on 26 nominations and a joint nominee on 25 others that included no future laureates.

As lore has it , the knock against Sommerfeld was that he had no single, great achievement that the committee could point to, even though his collective body of work stacked up to those of contemporaries who won the prize. Though Sommerfeld himself never won, the branches of his academic tree are weighted with Nobel gold: Four of his graduate students , and at least two of his students’ students , went on to become laureates.

The road to the Nobel Prize is paved with the careers of people like Sommerfeld, Oort, and Germer—gifted physicists who, subject to the whims and quirks of the prize committee, narrowly missed out on their discipline’s crowning achievement. So come Nobel Day, once everyone has toasted the newly minted laureates, let’s hope they’ll also raise a glass to the overlooked and left out: the Nobel also-rans.

Editor’s note, 22 September 2017: This story, which originally ran on 29 September 2016, has been updated and included as part of a series on the physicists nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.